As optical communications technologies rapidly develop, communications operators enter an era of a 100G rate. A 100G optical module (that is, optical transponder) has been standardized, and The Multisource Agreement (MSA) for a 100G long-haul dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical module has been released. This agreement specifies that a physical bus interface of a 100G optical module is a group of OTL4.10 (OTL: Optical channel Transport Lane, 4: OTU4 service, 10: a bus consisting of 10 signal cables) signals, and this group of OTL4.10 signals, along with another power supply signal, ground signal, clock signal, and control signal, form 168 signals. The 100G optical module is connected to a 100G line card by means of cooperation between a group of 168PIN male sockets and a group of 168PIN female sockets. However, due to a limitation on the number of pins of a 168PIN socket, a group of OTL4.10 buses can no longer be added.
At the same time, an optical module is also developing towards a 200G rate. A 200G signal processing chip is used inside a 200G optical module, and this type of chip generally supports 200G and 100G services and can be configured as a 100G or 200G service rate according to a requirement. Compared with a 100G signal processing chip used in the 100G optical module, the 200G signal processing chip uses a more advanced chip processing technique and a more advanced processing algorithm, and therefore its performance is generally higher than that of the 100G signal processing chip. If a hardware interface of the 200G optical module can be compatible with 100G and can be applied on a conventional 100G line card, a smooth upgrade of the 200G optical module on the basis of the 100G optical module can be implemented, thereby saving an investment of a customer and making full use of an advantage of higher performance of the 200G processing chip.
However, according to the current 100G MSA, an optical module has only one 168PIN socket, and a group of 100G services based on an OTL4.10 signal can no longer be added, that is, a purpose for using the optical module on a line card of different service rates cannot be achieved. By using a 100G line card and a 200G line card as an example, in the prior art, a single socket with more pins may be selected to implement a 200G service, but the 100G line card and the 200G line card cannot be assembled on a 168Pin socket of the conventional 100G line card. Alternatively, a higher-performance 100G optical module may be used on the conventional 100G line card. In this case, the 200G signal processing chip needs to be used to develop a 100G optical module that uses a 168PIN socket. However, in this way, a cost of the 100G optical module is high and a price of this development manner is huge.